noobatlife

I’ve recently been converted from the evils of bittorrent to Easynews.. and I gotta say I’m friggin impressed.

Easynews is a newsgroup service provider. Read the wiki link if you have no idea what that means - but to put it simply its a service that allows you to download music, movies, games and basically anything else you could think of.

I’ve used newsgroups in the past and have been massively turned off by the cumbersome news clients you’d have to use to connect, not to mention dealing with split files and parity.

This is where Easynews comes into a league of its own. They have developed an amazingly powerful web-based client that lets you search, preview and download files from directly in your web browser. You have to use it to fully appreciate just how awesome it is.

After you sign up you’ll wanna login to the Global search client using this link. I’m not sure why but they make it really hard to find the Global client, which to me is really stupid considering it’s the best feature of Easynews.

Anyway after you login you’ll be greeted with the web-based newsgroup search screen -

Just type in whatever you’re looking for into the global search, fine tune it by selecting file type or size constraints (I usually don’t bother), and hit search!

When the results come up you get heaps of info about the file, and for videos you can view thumbnails of the movie before you download!

The best part is, once you’ve found what you want to download the link is just a regular http link that you can download with firefox - or load it up into your favorite download manager (I use flashgot) and hammer the server with 8 connections at once.

I have just a normal DSL line (naked dsl2+ with iinet in australia) here and I download faster then 1800KB/s usually. Its incredibly fast.

There are also a number of more advanced features of the Easynews Global search client - like being able to group multiple files together into a zip filesand download them in 1 hit. I won’t go into them all because to be honest I don’t use them!

Hope I helped someone out there get into newsgroups and finally find an easier more secure way to download things off the net!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under internet.